‘When?’ asked Dolden.
‘September the first. Two weeks from today.’
The Flying Squad began life in 1919 as the Mobile Patrol Experiment, a rapid-response unit dedicated to armed robbery. The nickname was a reference to the fact that they were the first detectives to be issued with cars and the only ones allowed to pursue criminals into any police division.
During the 1970s their exploits had been immortalised by a television drama,
The Sweeney
(from the Cockney rhyming slang Sweeney Todd = Flying Squad), which portrayed its officers as hard-drinking men prone to violence in both their personal and professional lives. It was uncomfortably close to the truth – in a few cases. Many Flying Squad officers were specially selected because they had grown up in an area of London known as the Bermondsey Triangle, where the vast majority of top armed robbers seem to hail from. For years it was not uncommon for Sweeney detectives to find themselves arresting people with whom they had been at school.
Such close links with the criminal community inevitably bred widespread corruption and, more than once, huge numbers of officers were fired or jailed. By the time Shatford took over in mid-1999, the squad’s reputation was in tatters and there was even talk of it being disbanded. A new corruption scandal had surfaced and several senior officers had been imprisoned after allegations that, rather than catching villains, they had been planning and carrying out robberies. Shatford knew only too well that in saving the diamonds he would also be saving the reputation of the Flying Squad.
In the early hours of 1 September, a Brinks Mat armoured truck left the Dome
en route
to Heathrow airport. It was empty, the diamonds having been smuggled out secretly as a precaution the day before. Two firearms teams followed close behind and four others had been posted along the route, but it was soon clear there would be no raid. At the time that the truck pulled out of the Dome complex, Lee Wenham was still in bed, Terry Millman was at home with his family, and all of the suspect stolen vehicles were in the warehouse at Tong Farm.
But a chance sighting was about to change everything.
Just after nine thirty a.m. Detective Sean Allan, one of several Flying Squad officers posted at the Dome as a back-up, made a frantic call to Shatford’s cellphone. ‘Guv, Ray Betson has just come in. And he’s got Bill Cockram with him.’
Forty-year-old Raymond Betson was just about the most cunning and sophisticated armed robber Britain had ever produced, having amassed a personal fortune well in excess of £10 million in a series of daring raids. Despite topping the Flying Squad’s most-wanted list for five years, detectives had not been able to produce a single scrap of evidence against him.
Betson had never worked, never paid tax and had no social-security number, yet in 1997 he had moved from his grim east London apartment into a £500,000 mansion with his lover and their child, paying for the property in cash. Every item of his clothing, right down to his underwear, bore a designer label, and a brand new Mercedes and a top-specification Range Rover sat in the driveway of his home.
William Cockram, forty-nine, was Betson’s right-hand man and lived in equal opulence with his wife and two children. The pair had grown up in the same street in south London and become partners in crime at an early age. Although both men had previous convictions, they were for minor offences. Between them, they had spent barely a year in jail.
They both owned properties around the world, and what money they could not hide or launder they spent on a champagne lifestyle. To celebrate the new millennium, Betson and Cockram had taken their wives to New York on Concorde and watched the fireworks from a skippered yacht on the harbour. Each ticket for the event, which included a black-tie ball and accommodation in penthouse suites at the Four Seasons, cost £30,000.
Meticulous and aware of every new advance in forensic science, Betson had avoided capture by becoming a master of police tactics. He invested in the latest scanning devices and practised techniques designed to frustrate attempts to keep him under surveillance as a matter of course. Even on the shortest, most innocent of car journeys, he would double back on himself, run red lights or drive around roundabouts several times. Previous attempts to tail him or place bugs in his home had all ended in disaster.
Betson had made sure no one was following him on his way to the Dome, but once he arrived he relaxed. With dozens of tourists milling around he never noticed the slim blonde female detective with the video camera filming him from a discreet distance. Assuming they were safe, the pair did little to hide their intentions. When Cockram went into the diamond vault, he spent several minutes examining the cabinets, feeling for joins and seals, even getting down on his knees to look for weak spots underneath. He then filmed the vault with his own video camera. The pair left the Dome, walked around it and along the banks of the Thames, pointing out the location of nearby jetties and other features. It was obvious that they were working with Wenham and Millman.
Later that same afternoon, they met Aldo Ciarrocci, a former boyfriend of Cockram’s eldest daughter, at a shopping centre further down the river. As they used his video camera to play back footage of the vault, Cockram was heard to say, ‘I thought it was pie in the sky but after being round there I can’t believe it. Security is so light. I kept thinking it can’t be true. But it is. I’m telling you, boys, this is a gift.’
David James, executive chairman of the Millennium Dome, had been in the job just two days when Shatford and Dolden came to see him on 7 September to outline the plot to steal the diamonds, which had now returned from Japan and were back on display in the Dome’s vault. The previous day the sixty-three-year-old former industry troubleshooter had managed to secure an additional £47 million in government funding to keep the Dome open, despite a growing public demand for it to be shut. Despite the extra money, the whole project was hanging by a thread. The last thing he wanted was any bad publicity.
‘I listened to what they had to say and I was absolutely horrified,’ says James. ‘The plan was to keep the Dome running as normal and then let the robbers – who would almost certainly be heavily armed – into the diamond vault, give them a few minutes to start attacking the display case and mount an ambush. I had a vision of a massive shoot-out between the police and the gang with members of the public caught in the middle going down like ninepins. I told them straight: there was no way I was going to let it happen.’
But Shatford, who had now taken overall control of the operation on behalf of the two police forces, was adamant that striking before they reached the vault would be even more dangerous as the robbers might scatter and take hostages.
All argument ended when Shatford announced a new plan: he would scare the robbers off from the Dome and they would move on to a new target. The police would have no idea where so would be able to do nothing about it. If someone got hurt and it emerged that an earlier opportunity to arrest the gang had been blocked that would be the worst publicity of all. James reluctantly agreed to let the raid go ahead.
All through September, the gang made preparations for the robbery, unaware that the police were watching their every move. Wenham began adapting the bulldozer, removing sections to make it lighter and enable it to carry four men rather than one; he also joined Betson, Cockram and others to test a speedboat and a nearby harbour. When it proved too slow, Millman was sent out to buy another, getting the receipt made out in the name ‘Mr T. Diamond’. Millman also bought an industrial nailgun, a device capable of firing nails with the force of a bullet, hard enough to penetrate solid steel.
At the same time analysts working for the Flying Squad identified more than sixty days between mid-September and the end of the year (when the Dome would close for good) when tidal conditions were right for the raid to take place. On each such day, up to 150 armed police officers would move into the Dome in the early hours of the morning. Some would be positioned behind a false wall in the back of one of the exhibits; others would disguise themselves as cleaners, hiding their guns in black rubbish bags as they mingled among the visitors.
By the end of October there had been around twenty such full-scale alerts but no robbery. As the logistics of having so many firearms teams at the Dome on so many mornings began to affect policing in other parts of London, Shatford came under increasing pressure to drop the operation on the grounds that it looked as if the robbery would never happen. In a series of heated arguments he pleaded for more time and won a temporary reprieve.
At Tong Farm, tensions within the gang were also reaching boiling-point. James, a friend of Betson who had been brought in to drive the getaway boat, had stormed out and refused to take part in the raid. He had become increasingly uncomfortable working alongside the ageing Terry Millman, who was rapidly becoming a major liability.
In early October, Millman had been stopped by police while driving one of the stolen vans they intended to use in the diamond raid. A breath test showed he was way over the alcohol limit and he was due to appear in court at the end of November. Rather than cleaning up his act, Millman got drunk again and crashed yet another of the gang’s stolen vans. He ran away from the scene of the accident before he could be caught.
No one could understand it: Millman had always been a consummate professional and such reckless behaviour was out of character. What he had failed to tell the rest of the gang was that, earlier in the year, he had been diagnosed with terminal stomach cancer. He had taken part in the raids at Nine Elms and Aylesford in a bid to get enough cash to secure his family’s future. With both robberies having ended in failure, he desperately needed the raid on the Dome to work out. As his depression grew, so did his drinking problem. But to the other members of the gang, it just seemed that Millman was losing his edge. Originally a key member of the team, he was relegated to a more junior position.
But with James gone the gang was still left with the problem of what to do about the getaway boat. Without it the raid could not go ahead. ‘Don’t worry,’ Cockram told his colleagues. ‘I know someone who knows about boats. I’ll sort it out.’
All his life Kevin Meredith had struggled to make ends meet. The thirty-five-year-old softly spoken father of three had set up a charter-boat business from his home town of Brighton on the south coast of England but barely made enough to get by. The previous year Cockram had booked Meredith to take him and a few friends on a fishing trip and the pair had become friendly. In the weeks that followed, Cockram had taken two more trips and Meredith found himself telling his passenger all about his financial problems. His mooring fees were due and he was unable to pay: he might have to consider selling his business.
‘How much do you owe?’ Cockram asked.
‘About fourteen hundred pounds.’
‘Is that all? I can lend you that, no problem. Don’t worry about paying it back, just give it to me when you can.’
Meredith had accepted the money gratefully and did not hear from his benefactor again until 3 November when Cockram called and suggested they meet. As they sat in a bar on the edge of Brighton marina, Cockram asked for his money.
‘I don’t have it,’ said Meredith. ‘You know I don’t have it.’
‘In that case,’ replied Cockram, ‘could you do me a favour and drive a speedboat for ten to fifteen minutes? I’ll wipe the debt off if you do.’
Meredith swallowed hard. He knew little about Cockram, but the few conversations they had shared, his easy access to money and the company he chose to keep screamed that this man made his living outside the law. ‘I’m not sure,’ Meredith mumbled. ‘I don’t think I can.’
The smile faded from Cockram’s face. ‘Why not?’
‘Speedboats are a whole different game from the boats I take out. I’ve never driven one.’
‘There’ll be time to practise. You can learn. It can’t be that different.’
‘I don’t know, Bill, I think I’m going to have to say no.’
Cockram leant forward and hissed, ‘I think you need to think about this more. Not just for yourself. Remember your wife and kids.’
The next morning Meredith told his wife he was travelling to London to help a friend with some building work and set off for the capital.
John Shatford awoke on the morning of Monday 6 November with the unshakeable belief that something big was about to happen. He would have put money on it. At eight thirty a.m. he sat in the control room of the Dome and watched a monitor as live pictures were fed to him of Millman’s white van towing a speedboat towards the north bank of the river Thames. Twenty minutes later the bulldozer, which had been moved into a warehouse a few minutes’ drive from the Dome, emerged and started trundling towards the site. Shatford began pacing back and forth in anticipation. ‘I knew it was coming. It was all happening and they were on their way to us.’
But as quickly as it had started, so it ended. The bulldozer stopped, turned round and headed back to the yard. Millman towed the boat back towards Tong Farm. Shatford didn’t want to believe the police operation had been blown, but it was a possibility. By now at least four hundred officers knew about the ambush. If the gang had someone on the inside, they would know all about it. With Betson’s track record, it was even possible the gang were just toying with the Flying Squad.
In fact, the decision to abort at the last minute had been made by none other than Kevin Meredith. As he and Millman struggled to get the speedboat into the water, Meredith realised the tide was simply too low to allow the boat to be launched. With no river getaway possible, Betson decided there was nothing to do but wait until the following day.
The morning of the seventh found Shatford in a more sombre mood. He remained calm as, once again, the bulldozer emerged from its hiding-place and Millman’s van towed the speedboat towards the river. This time the boat was launched and, within minutes, Meredith was carrying out practice manoeuvres before opening up the throttle and heading east towards the Dome. Following the instructions he had been given, he steered into a small creek, tied up and waited.